In today's telecommunications, digital networks transport large amounts of information. Network services can be, for example, traditional voice phone, facsimile, television, audio and video broadcast, and information transfer.
With the increasing need of information exchange in the global society, the capacity of existing and future networks must be used efficiently. Multiplexers switch different network services to a single network in such a way that every service is fully maintained and does not disturb other services.
In the near future communication controllers and their components will have to be cheaper but also will have to cope with a dramatic increment in the number of supported data sources, higher communication rates and to efficiently adapt to dynamic communication scenarios.
There is a growing need to support more communication channels and to perform the multiplexing operation in an efficient manner, without complex and area-consuming components.
Yet there is a growing need to design communication controllers and communication controller components (including serial interfaces) in a modular manner, which will facilitate a re-use of many portions of designed components.